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Keep it simple (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Alright, are you calling English sane?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn't use articles!

[+] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

they can create tablets

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm still smiling at this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gendered articles probably not but having "a" vs "the" removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian don't have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They're basically the Roman languages' way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.

"Ami" and "amie" are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you'd likely miss it anyway). However "un ami" is different from "une amie".

So in French you'd say "hier je suis sorti avec une amie" which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like "yesterday I went out with a female friend".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The ol mnemonic my German professor taught me about remembering the German articles:
Rese
Nese
Merman
Sister Sister

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I took several years of German in highschool and in college and this doesn't make any sense to me. Explain please?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not op but I have a hunch,

The mnemonic is to remember the differences,

DeR - Rese

deN - Nese

DeM deM - MerMan

deS deS - Sister Sister.